Republicans

Democrat Al Franken agreed to resign from his post as a Minnesota Senator after eight women accused him of sexual harassment. When Franken was ousted I remarked that I would shed no tears for him, and that remains the case. But Franken was perhaps the target of a Republican smear campaign. Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Roger Stone tweeted that it was Franken’s “time in the barrel” hours before the allegations against him became public.

Donald Leon “Don” Blankenship isn’t just another typical rich, white, tall, 68-year-old Republican multi-millionaire ideologue serving out the last probationary year of his federal criminal sentence in Las Vegas while running for the US Senate in West Virginia.  He’s also an endlessly, self-righteously self-justifying mass murderer.

One of our most esteemed writers, Eric Zuesse, offered a great piece, to be found here, that made some significant note of the fact that Republican voters are actually moving away from their support in the Republican Party’s Representatives and Senators in Congress, though they are on the whole not moving away from their support of President Trump.

How to conceive of the two-party system
Lesser of two evils

by Eric Zuesse
The Morning Consult poll released on March 30th headlines “Republicans Drive Biggest Decline in Voter Optimism Since Trump Took Office: Record drop isn’t matched by a similar decrease in president’s approval rating.”

Does anyone seriously believe that Facebook had so much influence that it would “brainwash” a Hillary voter to go Trump? Are we all like this poor lady?

US Senator Rand Paul says that no one read the $1.3 billion 2,232 page omnibus bill that was passed last Friday. He says that when Republicans are in the minority, they are the conservative party, but when they are in the majority, they drop conservatism. He describes an 'unholy alliance' between both parties: Republicans want unlimited spending on the military, and Democrats allow it in exchange for unlimited domestic spending. [...]

“Public Troubled by Deep State” is the headline that the Monmouth University Polling Institute tags to its recent poll.
Polling about the term “Deep State” is problematical, because as the polling report says:

Few Americans (13%) are very familiar with the term “Deep State;” another 24% are somewhat familiar, while 63% say they are not familiar with this term.

So the careful pollsters at Monmouth defined the term as follows for their interviewees:

US empire is in decline. Reports of the end of the US being the unitary power in world affairs are common, as are predictions of the end of US empire. China surpassed the United States as the world economic leader according to Purchasing Power Parity Gross National Product, and Russia announced new weapons that can overcome the US’ defense systems.

That America’s income distribution has grown dramatically more unequal in the past 40 years is beyond debate. The share of the top 1 percent has doubled since 1980, to over 20 percent of all income.
Could it get any worse? A look at America’s large, privately held corporations suggests it could.
When Americans think of large corporations, most of us think of corporations like Pepsi or ExxonMobil, whose shares are publicly traded.